Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/662

646 obligation is quickened by the feeling that virtue, like art and elegance, is useful and even indispensable. Who is not familiar with the merchant whom business honor, as he calls it, keeps from dishonesty? The rogue plays the honest man mainly because he has a wholesome terror of the jail and the penitentiary. The decent member of society will not incur social ostracism by falling below the level of social requirement. With the sincere Christian, again, moral obligation is not infrequently transfigured by the constraining love of his master. Few of us, in fact, escape the influence of these or similar reinforcements of the ought-feeling in varying emphasis and complexity. The native hue of genuine moral obligation—submission to the right because it is right—is in most minds overlaid by the tones of associated feelings, which, in common with it, generate the impulse of self-surrender. The pure sense of duty is not so much an experience of life as an abstraction of the philosopher, who reflects upon life, and analyzes into separate elements what in experience is given as inseparable. Obligation, as an abstract feeling, rarely, if ever, rises above the threshold of consciousness; it is apt to appear in union with piety, devotion, sympathy, propriety, and prudence. If the average man is ever prompted to ask, Why ought I to do the right? his answer will contain, perhaps, the thought of the rectitude of the action and the realization of his higher nature by means of it; certainly, the thought of the divine and human wills that ordain it, and the divine and human sanctions by which it is enforced. Or, to state the matter generally, our actual sense of obligation is not simple, but compound; though (as we have already seen) an ultimate and unanalyzable feeling of surrender to some form of good is an ever-present and indispensable ingredient. This implicit element, which reflection throws into the foreground, is, in individual life, a rare and a late differentiation from a mass of complex sentiments formed in the course of communion with the life of the family, the state, the church, and society, by subordination to the ethics which these organizations respectively embody. We may call this the spontaneous and concrete; that, the reflective and abstract feeling of obligation.